Art punk is a category of punk bands which are arguably more sophisticated than their peers, and go beyond punk's garage rock foundations.[1] These groups generated punk's aesthetic of being simple, offensive, and free-spirited, in contrast to the angry, working-class audience generated by pub rock.[2] In the late 1970s, the term was used as a pejorative for punk bands who were out of step with the genre's ideologies (i.e. post-punk).[1]

History

In the rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean either "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive".[3] Musicologists Simon Frith and Howard Horne described the band managers of the 1970s punk bands as "the most articulate theorists of the art punk movement", with Bob Last of Fast Product identified as one of the first to apply art theory to marketing, and Tony Wilson's Factory Records described as "applying the Bauhaus principle of the same 'look' for all the company's goods".[4]Wire's Colin Newman described art punk in 2006 as "the drug of choice of a whole generation".[5]

Anna Szemere traces the beginnings of the Hungarian art-punk subculture to 1978, when punk band the Spions performed three concerts which drew on conceptualist performance art and Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty", with neo-avant-garde/anarchist manifestos handed out to the audience.[6]